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Comment by WaxProlix | Hacker News Reader

China poured more concrete in 2023-2025 than the US has throughout its entire history. China creates and consumes an order of magnitude more energy, and in an increasingly sustainable and cost-effective manner. China has largely moved towards internal market sufficiency, with internal demand outstripping external imports.

I'd be interested in a rebuttal piece too, because I don't necessarily want reality to be what it is. But it is, and it is.

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>Deliver growth, maintain order, forget the voting. It's spreading.

I think it's mostly this that makes me uncomfortable. I value Western ideals and am hopeful that they continue to spread.

The purpose of a thing is what it does. If Western ideals condone and actively fund atrocities like what's happening in Gaza, while failing to match the infrastructural pace of auth. regimes like China, it's only logical that people will gravitate towards the model that works.

For instance, California's Intercity High-Speed Rail Commission was created by the California legislature in 1993 (before my parents got married) to develop a plan that was to begin construction in 2000.

32 years later, it's still not done, yet China has built nearly 50,000 km of HSR in less than 20 years. The differences are as blatant as that between oranges and orangutans.

What does Western ideals even mean today? Only lesson I've learned about those ideals over the last 24 years is that it means killing millions of civilians.

To me, Western ideals are things like freedom of speech, democracy, and individual rights.

I hear you though.

>freedom of speech, democracy, and individual rights

For those within the imperial core. War, death, sanctions, and dilution of wealth for everyone outside it/whoever attempts to disagree.

their might be ideals but in the US of A neither exists anymore...

>> I value Western ideals

Somehow we ended up with Trump. Whatever system that brings you a Trump is a bad system.

Western ideals will be less supported every year, if they don’t find a way to prove that they’re actually better. Right now, they’re not proving themselves, as people are just not seeing progress in terms of QoL in their daily lives. There were big jumps every decade, however an average 30 year old hasn’t felt much in the past 10-15 years. Things just feel like they’re same or worse than before, and there’s no sign of improvement while everyone is slowly getting angry and finding a scapegoat.

> China creates and consumes an order of magnitude more energy

I'm gonna need a source for that one.

Best source I found quickly was Wikipedia, with 2023 data, showing China at about 2.5 times the US. That's surprising to me, but it's not an order of magnitude.

In 2024 it was 10073 TWh vs 4387 TWh, which would be an order of magnitude if you go by binary numbers hehe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

Geez, you almost forget 20% of their youth are unemployed. And thats the number they dare report.

Sure, and their real estate sector is shaky, their domestic investment model (and their foreign policy wrt trade and subsidy) has some real sustainability questions, it's not perfect but they're absolutely blitzing. Even if the growth plateaued now they'd eclipse the western world for the next century easily.

That's not any worse than big chunks of Europe. Surprisingly, it turns out that in a country with a strong social safety net, unemployment tends to run a tad higher than in places where if you don't work, you starve.

China's national unemployment rate was reported at 5.0% in June 2025 and 5.1% in July 2025.

Unemployment rate for youth (16- to 24-year-olds) in China ticked up to 17.8% in July . The US youth unemployment rate in the U.S. was 10.8 percent in July 2025.

So a difference of 7%.

How much of that concrete was poured into ghost cities?

Name a ghost city

Building in advance of demand is something the US should do a lot more of. Find a >10 year old story about a Chinese ghost city, then Google current population. It'll be full.

Where I live, they build a four-lane highway, then immediately after completing it, they start renovations on the same highway to expand it into a six-lane highway.

While the U.S. has Eminent Domain, although China's version seems to be more impactful (displacing 1.3 million people for the Three Gorges Dam).

I know nothing of Chinese property rights, but they must be strong or they wouldn't have the phenomenon of nail houses:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china...

The U.S. has nail houses too...

In fact nail houses were a thing in the U.S. long before in China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdout_(real_estate)

Building several fold more home than there are people when your demographics are moving the other direction is called debt fueled trap.

China still has significant internal migration from rural areas to the cities. They're building houses in areas people want to move to.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/even-chinas-14-bln-popul...

"Even China's population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country, a former official said on Saturday, in a rare public critique of the country's crisis-hit property market."

Now, housing gets old, people upgrade, so that supply will eventually be soaked up.

But the debt overhang on local governments and indivudal Chinese is the killer. They've built up several years of housing supply and now get to pay for it all while it stays empty for a few years - plus the value is dropping.

It's a massive drag on the economy as all that investment is locked up and unproductive.

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